Tuesday, February 10, 2015

85) Window Spider

Badumna insignis

I first notice the spider some
time early in the New Year. Or perhaps I’m mistaken: perhaps I notice it first
before Christmas, in the rush to finish the old year’s fading business. In any
case the spider is unremarkable and so its presence and the exact moment of its
arrival in my bathroom window goes unremarked upon. It is large and classically
spider-like. Its legs curve to a sharp point like cutlasses. Its abdomen is
half the size of the fingernail on my little finger. We fear spiders and this
spider appears fearsome.

I’ve seen its type before, this
species. One lives, or lived, in the cavity in my front door left by the long-removed
letter slot. One lives, or lived, at the top of the window in my bedroom;
another in the equivalent position in the sitting-room window. Their webs are
messy and fulsome, simultaneously dilapidated and fussily maintained. Much like
the old weatherboard terrace house they live in. The spider in the sitting-room
window lives in the gap between the flyscreen and the pane, and for fear of
crushing it I haven’t fully shut that window in years, even in the middle of
winter.

The spiders in the windows are on
the outside of the house. The one in the front door rarely shows itself. They
may all be dead by now for all I know. The spider in the bathroom, the
newcomer, is directly above the toilet, in the gap left by the sliding
mechanism for the bathroom window – and on the inside of the window. It is inside the house. It is inside the
bathroom. It is above my head when I am in the bathroom.

It’s not alone. There are two
Daddy Long-legs (Pholcus phalangioides) living under the bathroom sink. There are regular intrusions
of tiny Jumping Spiders (Salticidae),
strays from the garden. There are Houseflies (Musca domestica) everywhere, the
descendants of the flies that appeared from nowhere in their scores during last
summer’s heatwave. It is summer again now and the world is full of life; the
house is full of tiny life; the bathroom is full of predators.

I am loathe to kill any of them.
The flies, those that aren’t caught by the spiders, die off after three or four
weeks, having reached the natural limit of their lives. In another three or
four weeks their children hatch; mate; die again. In the time between
generations the Daddy Long-legs under the bathroom sink die: perhaps they, too,
have reached the end of their natural lifespan. Perhaps in the sudden absence
of prey they have starved to death.

The spider in the window is more
hardy. I watch it every time I enter the bathroom – first cautiously, then
curiously. It rarely strays from the dark hole above the sliding window in
which it lives. It stays within the perimeter of its messy web, though not on the web: it lurks beneath the surface
of the web like a shark beneath waves. I wonder at its species. From the
flotsam and jetsam of my mind, from the tide of information, a name surfaces: Window Spider. I type it into Google: Badumna insignis. Native to Australia.
Common in urban areas. More commonly known as the Black House Spider.

Harmless, as these things go:
“Black House Spiders are timid animals and bites from them are infrequent. The
bite may be quite painful and cause local swelling. Symptoms such as nausea,
vomiting, sweating and giddiness are occasionally recorded. In a few cases skin
lesions have developed after multiple bites.” So says the Australian Museum’s
website, and that’s good enough for me. I stop being cautious around the
spider. I look forward to seeing her whenever I go into a bathroom.

The spider is a her. It is a she.
Like many spiders Badumna insignis
demonstrates marked sexual dimorphism and the individual in my bathroom is
unquestionably a female. So why shouldn’t I call her “she”? Am I becoming
sentimental? Yes, undoubtedly. I am becoming fond of her.

It is summer. I am currently
living by myself and so I’ve advertised my spare room on AirBnB. It is summer
in Australia so I have more
booking requests than I can keep up with: emails go unanswered, the turnover is
high, people come from all over the world to visit Melbourne, in summer, and stay in my house. I
worry about the flies and I worry about the spiders: what will my houseguests
think? Australia
has a reputation abroad and we play up to it but the truth is that it is easy
to live here if you’re sensible with the wildlife. If you know what can hurt
you and what can’t. If you don’t go around provoking things. I tell my guests
when they arrive that it is summer, in Australia, and so there are many
spiders, but that they are all harmless – even the big black one in the
bathroom, the scariest-looking of the lot. The spiders go unremarked upon.
Everyone is fine. Even the woman who sees a Mouse (Mus musculus) in the kitchen and
becomes so scared of it that she cannot bare to stay another day in the house
makes no mention of the spider in the bathroom.

Perhaps she doesn’t see it. The
spider is cautious, and stays mostly hidden during the day; though if you look
carefully you can see the tips of her legs, those things that look like they should
be weapons but which aren’t, protruding beyond the lip of the hole she hides
in.

But she – the spider – is quick
to move when she senses prey. In the bathroom one morning before leaving for
work I see her rush out of her hole as an injudicious fly approaches her web.
The fly is underneath the silk canopy when it sees the spider advancing towards
it. It stops. The spider stops. The fly cannot take flight: if it does so it
will become entangled in the web above it. It cannot retreat by foot: the spider
is faster by far than it is. I don’t know what will happen. I have to go to
work. When I return ten hours later neither fly nor spider are in sight. I do
not know how the standoff resolved and I cannot imagine it.

At night she is bolder. The house
is quieter at night; hours go by in which the bathroom is undisturbed. The
flies are more listless at night, too. The spider emerges more readily from her
hole at night, and often when I go into the bathroom before going to bed I see
her, whole, framed against the moonlight coming in through the window: eight
long legs, fleshy abdomen, stubby head, classically spider. I stand on the lip
of the bathtub to take a photo of her; I have to get in close and even then the
camera on my phone refuses to focus on her, preferring the light in the window
behind her. The first time I lean in she takes fright and flees back to her
hole; on subsequent occasions she remains still, implacable. If a spider can
think I do not know what she is thinking; I do not want to ascribe sentiment to
her. I would like to imagine that she feels safe, as I feel safe with her. I
like to imagine that by sheer volume of exposure we have each overcome our fear
of the other.

I want to be sentimental. I am sentimental. I name her: I give the
spider that lives in my bathroom a name. I cast about for suitable options, I
ask people for suggestions, I have in mind something like Boadicea because it
amuses me to name this predator after a famous warrior. It is probably
disrespectful. I know it is absurd. I can’t shake the thought. Suggestions come
in and none of them fit. I do some research and find that the Window Spider’s
genus is Badumna. It feels right. It
feels appropriate. I name her Badumna.

It is ridiculous to name a spider
but this species, I read, can live for up to two years. It can experience a
summer, and another summer; it can witness the changing of seasons, the
shortening and lengthening of days. In light of that it seems not quite so
ridiculous to name this individual. Why shouldn’t I? She’s only been living
with me for a few months but I have become fond of her.

Summer rolls on. It’s a cool
summer, and grey, but people come to Melbourne
as if it was a summer like any other. They are drawn by the name of the season,
it has a magic. Houseguests leave and another arrives: French out, Chilean in.

His flight landed at 9:30pm last
Saturday night. He came straight from the airport and arrived at 10:15: he had
cousins in the city and they gave him a lift. They all arrived together and
then left again straight away, his cousins eager to show him the city, he eager
to see it; all of them eager to spend time with each-other. I have cousins
overseas, I know what it’s like to see each-other only once every few years.

I had a busy few days. I was out
most nights. In my houseguest’s first few nights with me I saw him for only
five minute, and we laughed, and shook hands, and agreed that we’d spend time
together soon. He’d be staying with me for a week and a half, there was no
rush. I wrote the WiFi password down for him, showed him the kitchen, gave him
the spare key. We didn’t have time to talk so I didn’t get a chance to tell him
about the spiders in the house, or perhaps I forgot to. I didn’t have time to
reassure him that despite what he’d heard about Australia the spiders in the house
were harmless, even the big black one in the bathroom.

He’d just flown from Chile, all that
distance across the world. He was jetlagged. He got up at strange times, used
the bathroom late at night when he was awake and I was asleep. Sometimes I
heard him walking down the hallway. I didn’t mind. Live and let live.

On Monday morning I woke up to go
to work, and I went into the bathroom, and there was a hole in Badumna’s web.
It looked as if the heart had been torn out of it. There was no sign of Badumna
herself, not beneath what was left of her web, not in the darkness of her hole.
I left for work and hoped that she’d just got a fright from the newcomer to the
house, and would re-emerge.

When I returned home there was
still no sign of her. There was an emptiness against the window-pane where I
had become used to seeing her, black, sharp-legged, classically spiderish. I
slid the window open, hoping it might stir her from hiding. Something fell out
of the window and into the garden, something dark and bundled in silk. Was that
her? Had she lost her balance as I’d slid the window unexpectedly and fallen
out? No, unlikely. The remains of some old meal, probably. I slid the window
shut again. By opening and shutting the window I destroyed what was left of the
web; the loose strands fell and clung to the edge of the pane, the white sprawl
that had covered a whole corner of the pane was gone. I looked for the tips of
her legs, poking out of her hole. Nothing.

When I’d asked for names for her
one of the suggestions had been Charlotte.
I’d know it would be. We all learn when we’re kids about the noble spider, we
grieve at her death. We learn that lesson young and I don’t know when we
unlearn it. The night before she disappeared Badumna had been unusually bold:
stalking a fly, she’d been further out of her web than I’d ever seen her. I
stood on the lip of the bathtub, I got a photo, the camera wouldn’t focus on
her. Spiders are the most patient of predators: they can stay in place for hours,
waiting for their prey to make the wrong move, present the right opportunity.
When I went to bed she was still out in the middle of the glass, unmissable.

The next day when she was gone I
checked the dustpan-and-brush for spider silk. Nothing, but still: I imagined
my houseguest entering the bathroom late that night, seeing the big black
spider. I imagined him standing on the lip of the bathtub, swatting at the
spider with the dustpan-and-brush. I imagined him dropping the spider into the
toilet, flushing it. I don’t understand this need to kill. I don’t understand
what possesses us when we see a spider, or a fly, and we feel that it is our
obligation to kill it though it poses no threat to us at all. I saw my
houseguest briefly last night, we said hello to each-other. I didn’t mention
the spider to him, I didn’t ask him about her – how do you ask somebody if they
killed a spider, and why? He didn’t mention anything, either. Killing spiders
requires no remarks. It does not need to be commented upon. It’s a household
chore, like putting the bins out, or washing the dishes. It is unsentimental.

Louis MacNeice wrote a long elegy
upon the death of his cat. You’ll only find it in his Collected Poems. Too much
sentiment to ever be Selected. Nobody wants to see a master Modernist grieve
for an animal. So this is an epitaph,
goes the poem’s final stanza:

… not for calamitous

Loss but for loss;
this was a person

In a small way who had
touched our lives…

Tonight I got home from work just
after eight. I went into the bathroom. I looked up to the window, hoping
against hope. You’d barely even know now that there was anything living there just
a couple of days ago. I put a load of laundry on. The broom was in front of the
washing-machine door so I moved it, and as I did so I flipped it on end the
better to lean it in the small gap between the washing-machine and the wall.

Covering the bristles of the
broom was the web. That hole punched in the white above the window. Silk sticks
like blood. Is that too much? Much too much, yes. Too sentimental by half. But
there it is, nonetheless. So now I knew. Now I understood how. Not flushed, not
bundled out the window. Stomped, smashed. Disposed of in a matter of moments
with the tools at hand. No need for thanks. Just another household chore, just
being a good houseguest. I won’t raise it with him: what would be the point?
How do you explain to someone that you have formed a bond with a spider, that
there exists a place between pets and wildlife in which animals may sometimes
find themselves, safe, cherished? How do you tell someone that you wish, more
than anything, more than you can ever say, that they hadn’t killed a spider? I
know it is eccentric to become so attached.

I looked closer at the broom. I
don’t know why. I think I was hoping that somehow, in the gap between the
bristles, she might be cowering. I think I was hoping that I might find there
some evidence, somehow, that she had dropped off the broom and rushed off
behind the washing-machine to start another web, another life, out of sight,
out of the way. I don’t know why I looked. I wish I hadn’t. Oh no, I said to myself. Oh no. Beneath the bristles, suspended
in the silk: two legs, long, curved, pointed like cutlasses. Just the legs. That
was all that was left.

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